So things are far from over. They finally found a route to get water to the core in number 3 and things stabilized for for 3 weeks or so. I still read the two daily reports from TEPCO every day, and the numbers have started rising again, by about 10 degrees a day. I hope they don't eventually run out of routes to the core. These things need constant cooling or the decaying process starts heating them right back up again. If the cores heat up past a certain point there will be more hydrogen explosions. Even "spent rods" need cooling for years.

And as I am sure you have some idea of, the leaks continue. The basements below the reactors are almost completely full, projected to fill up in about 2 days, and TEPCO is out of places to pump excess. The rainy season has started, which will greatly exacerbate this.

A facility to decontaminate leaking water is nearing completion, should be finished by June 15th, but noone knows how many times the water will have to be decontaminated before it is relatively "safe" and noone knows how well the facility will stand up to all the salt, sand, and oil etc. that will be in the water, because there has never been a facility that has had to do this.

Radiation levels in the air continue to drop slowly but surely. I have noticed they are dropping more slowly as if we are reaching some kind of equilibrium. They are still around 50-60% higher than low averages before the accident.

Food is being monitored (one has to wonder how diligently). What we are eating should be safe. We continue to take extra precautions.

The opposition party and many in the ruling party are trying to get rid of the PM, cuz everything's his fault. Every Japanese knows that noone to replace him is going to do any better, but they still let them bicker on, when they need to be focused on getting this country safely back on it's feet. Ergghh!

I am not sure if they are planning to reuse decontaminated water or not. It might very well still be full of oil etc. I believe they may try to find away to pump already contaminated water from below the reactors back into the top, while they are working on any excess by decontaminating it and releasing it into the sea (nowhere else to release it even though it won't be completely safe).

Or at least that's my read right now. I am not as up to the minute as I was in those first few weeks. I just spent the last half hour reading over my ramblings here since I started posting about the situation. Crazy stuff.

Come to think, the water below, decontaminated or no is going to be dirty and will degrade the integrity of the containment vessel even more. Now you would think to yourself that experts have thought this through, but I am amazed at some of the flub-ups they have had up to this point.

When the first significant leak into the sea was discovered, they tried sealing it with many things, including cement. Even I, who knows next to nothing, knew that concrete needs a certain water to other ingredients ratio in order to harden.* Well, they forgot that and only made sludge which hampered following efforts to plug the gap - though they did finally manage it.

*Believe I learned this from a Leave it to Beaver episode I saw as a kid; leave it to the beave.

.Chernobyl was/is buried under a massive concrete sarcophagus.I know that back in March, some people were talking about doing the same thing in Japan.Back then, the Japanese authorities were saying that it was too early to start thinking about long term measures.The Chernobyl sarcophagus wasn't designed to last more than 20 to 30 years.And the Chernobyl structure now has huge holes and fissures.

Let's hope the experts can get the Japanese situation under control..

_________________________
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

Yeah, saw this news. Your link didn't have it but a similar article I saw also said they think that the plant gave off twice as much radiation as they thought it did in the first six days when they upped the accident to a 7 on the scale. Yes, the info that led them to reassess it as a 7 has been reexamined and they now think it was even twice that. Still not Chernobyl, still very scary.

Let's see. Though it never made the news, reactor 3 shot up in temperature again as I said, but in the last 3 days or so they seem to have found a new route to cool the core. If you can still call it a core. You may have heard that the 3 meltdowns are now meltthroughs and have been for most of this fiasco. They are molten slags that have melted down out of their containment vessls and are sitting in the bottom of the reactors. In terms of what can actually go on inside a reactor short of an uncontrolled chain reaction, this is the worst thing that can happen and it happened times 3.

Radiation levels have stopped dropping off for several days now in Tokyo and have plateued at around .0600, about 50 percent higher than they were. I would assume this is because the radioactive iodine is quickly dissipating (8 day half life) and the majority of the remaining levels comes from cesium (30 year half life, stays in body for a few weeks). Again these are supposed to be safe levels and the majority of cancers around Chernobyl were thryoid cancers from iodine. Hopefully we are through the worst.

I have read some scary commentary from a US expert (saying nothing debunkable as far as I have researched) that says if the spent fuel rods storage pool next to reactor 4 is further damaged by a 7-ish earthquake that there is but one choice: get out of Japan and quickly, do not pass go do not collect 200 yen.

The biggest news is the contaminated water under the reactors will overflow by the 20th of June or earlier if the rainy seasons picks up. They have started testing out decontamination facilities built quickly on the spot that will pump the cleaned water back into the reactors instead of using new water. The testing is not going well. Several days have passed with no real progress and the 20th, which is only an estimate, approaches.

Sorry, wife's laptop drops the ball sometimes, so I must "submit" often or risk losing what I typed.

Even without these overflows strontium in very dangerous amounts (250 times normal) was found in the groundwater below the plant. Strontium is nasty stuff, makes cesium look like a picnic. Since the scare in late March, tap water here is still for the time being safe, as in undetectable amounts of radioactive particles.

They are up to 6 workers who have gone over the acceptable 250 millisieverts limit in battling this nightmare. Another possible 60 or so are over the 100 millisiervert exposure limit, which was the old limit before this hell on earth called by the name of Fukushima Daiichi.

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